"Him a'got too much skin": psoriatic masculinity and The Singing Detective

Although hysteria has traditionally been the purview of femininity, the male hysteric has become more prevalent under the social and cultural conditions of postmodernity, namely, the delegitimation and fragmentation of identity. This article reads the central trope of psoriasis in Dennis Potter’s television mini-series The Singing Detective as a corporeal symptom that ambivalently reflects, and resists, the economic and social context of Thatcherite Britain. Philip Marlow’s psoriasis enacts both the erosion and the overproduction of boundaries, and is read as metonymic for a male social body that is being experienced as under siege.